Rotating savings · Pakistan and northern India
What is a committee?
The Pakistani and North Indian rotating savings circle: a fixed monthly amount from every member, and one member takes the whole pool each month.
- Where
- Pakistan and northern India, and South Asian communities abroad
- Where the word comes from
- English, borrowed into Urdu and Punjabi as "kameti". People say "I am running a committee" the way an English speaker might say "I am in a savings club".
- Typical size
- 10 to 25 members
- How often
- Monthly, for as many months as there are members
- Who goes first
- Drawn by lot, or negotiated — an urgent need moves someone up by agreement
Where it comes from
Committee is so ordinary in Pakistan that the English word has simply become the local word for the practice. It runs in offices, in bazaars, among neighbours and — very commonly — among women within an extended family, where it is often the only money a household manages independently.
The borrowed name is worth pausing on. There is no indigenous term that displaced it, because the arrangement is understood as exactly what the word says: a group of people who have agreed to run something together.
How it runs
Members agree a monthly figure and a number of months matching the number of people. Everyone pays the same amount each month, and one member takes the entire pool. The organiser — often the person who assembled the group — collects, keeps the list, and carries the reputational risk if someone stops paying.
Order is usually drawn by lot at the start, but it is routinely renegotiated. Someone with a wedding, a medical bill or school fees due will say so, and the group moves them up. This is settled by conversation rather than by any auction or formal rule.
A committee is very often deliberately timed against a known expense — a wedding season, Eid, a school year — so the pool arrives when the money is needed rather than at an arbitrary point.
What makes a committee different
The vocabulary is the giveaway that this is a distinct social institution rather than an import: in Pakistani English and Urdu, "committee" as a noun means the savings circle itself. Someone who says they have "put money in the committee" is not describing a governing body.
It is also unusually tied to household wedding finance. Across much of Pakistan a daughter's wedding is the single largest expense a family will face, and committees are frequently formed and timed years in advance specifically against it.
Abroad
Pakistani and Indian communities in the United Kingdom, the Gulf, the United States and Canada run committees widely, often among colleagues who migrated together or within a single extended family spread across three countries.
The Gulf corridor is where the strain shows. Members earn in dirhams or riyals, the organiser may be in Karachi or Lahore, and contributions arrive through several remittance services with their own fees and delays — while the record of who has paid lives in one person's notebook or phone.
The same idea, elsewhere
Run your circle with the rules in the open
Njangi On-Chain keeps the tradition exactly as it is — everyone contributes on schedule, everyone takes a turn — and puts the schedule, the order, and the full history where the whole circle can see them. No treasurer holding the money.